September 11th, 2012 the contractions start. I pray that she waits until midnight. I pray that she not have the stigma of sharing her birthday with a national tragedy.

She did wait, though by the time midnight agonizingly arrived I was pleading with her to make her appearance. Of course I know now the date doesn’t matter in the end. The birth of something you’ve created brings everlasting sunshine to the darkest day. Miracles and tragedies exist side by side, each contrasting the other so vividly that you know these are the only moments that make you alive.

Lola. My sweet Lola. She kicked her way through my entire pregnancy, and she does the same now. Kicking and pushing to get out, to get away, to be independent. Lola is my second lesson in letting go.

From the beginning I had to let go of expectations. Expecting to wait a while before I had another baby. Expecting to have an easy pregnancy. Expecting to have a natural childbirth. Expecting to breastfeed. These, all out of my hands, hoping and wishing things would be different, and then the relief of acceptance when I understood my path.

Pink Cheeks

And then Lola. Expecting to have another blondie blue-eyed babe. Expecting to have another snuggler, like Noah, a baby who would rather be in my arms than not. Expecting a soft, sweet lover. Expecting someone more like me.

But she is her own girl, and will defy expectations. She shatters them, and shows me why it was crazy to have them in the first place. She dances to the beat of her own congo. She yells with delight, often and loudly. She smiles with her whole body. When she comes to you, you feel special knowing that she picked you, she picked this moment to give to you and no one else.

She is walking now, and the irony is that she needs me now more than ever to steady herself. She grasps on so tightly, understanding that I’m here when she needs me. And then she lets go, off on another adventure. I savor those grasping moments. When her hands clamp around my legs I relax into acceptance. I know my purpose for her. I am illuminated.

I have mourned that there isn’t as much of me for her as was for Noah. With the second there is always less. While your love may multiply, your times divides, and the second must always fend for themselves a little bit more.

She knows she hilarious.

I know this will make her stronger. I know she was strong already. Lola does not need hand holding. She just needs to know you are there.

I can’t contain this firecracker. And I don’t want to. I can only be her launch pad. I will steady her and then fall back and let her soar. She has so much energy, contains so much fire, and color, and life in this tiny vessel. My job is to point her to the stars and release. She may reach those stars, or maybe will be content being her own star. I know she will be explosive, that she will entertain and inspire awe, and that people will be drawn to watch her in all her glory.

You release knowing that you have no control; knowing that it is the only way she can shine.

Lola, my love. I thought I had so much to teach you. But it is you who continues to teach me. To be open. To not hold so tight. To have patience. To laugh often. To slow down. To recognize my strength. To forgive my weakness. To love loudly. To look for miracles in the shadows because the best ones hide there.

(Warning: This post contains lots of bad poo puns. I couldn’t help myself. You can use it like a drinking game if you want. Whenever you see a poo pun down a glass of Pinot. Or, just down a glass of Pinot. Still totally fun.)

I’ve been debating about writing about this for some time. First, because my story involves poo, and all the moms I know seem to have had their fill of poo stories.

Second, because I really want to keep my seat in the crunchy moms club and things are very precarious right now. I figured I was in the club for LIFE with my home birth and all. But then I couldn’t breast feed, and I nearly got myself kicked out by dropping the ‘F’ bomb on my baby. (Formul-AH!!) I made up to them and earned a probationary membership back in the club when I agreed to cloth diaper.

And third, I feel like a failure – too selfish and tired and sick of touching poo to care that I am destroying the Earth irreparably with each baby, to the tune of something like 5 tons of dirty dipes per kid. But. I couldn’t keep it up. I gave up on cloth diapering because I did not have the patience for it or the energy to wash all those dipes or the desire to bring extra outfits with me everywhere because inevitably someone was gonna leak their shit.

Oh, at first it’s fun. I convinced my husband to let me invest in the whole shebang up front because we were going to “save so much money,” and then had a grand time spending $500 on the cutest little diapering things you ever did see!! CD moms (that’s ‘cloth diapering” moms to those lay folks out there) call CDs “fluff.” And little baby bums look so friggin‘ fluffy cute in huge ass cloth diapers with patterns like dollar bills on them!

First one I tried was gDiapers, probably the most widely recognized CD. I put it on Noah and it was so adorable. He instantly became a gBabe! Pictures, pictures. He was gonna be an Instagram sensation! gDiapers would want him for their spokesbaby!

Within an hour it leaked. I hopped on the internet. I spent hours reading gDiaper blogs and getting to know the ins and outs of the gMom community (yes, I am a gMom now!!) and ordering my gDiaper diaper bag so that everyone who saw me would know that I am gDiapering.

Ok, of course, user error. I tried again with Noah and put the leg holes in the crease and “made a seal” and made it tight but not too tight and let him loose. Leak. Back on the internet, doubled up the inserts, leak leak leak. I tried that sucker 5 or 6 times and couldn’t get it to work. I am bombing at this already and it’s only the first day.

Now I’m on the internet reading the “I hate gDiaper” blogs and going, yeah! Those suck! No wonder I couldn’t get it right! And start researching other cloth diapers with a better reputation. After hours and hours and hours of research I decide that BumGenius diapers are what I need. I order 15 of them. These are great because they are one size fits all and so Noah and Lola will both be able to use them and I am saving so much goddam money Mat is gonna buy me a diamond because he is in such awe at my frugalness!

I also order a cloth diaper pail because you can’t use a Diaper Genie, duh! I order cloth wipes because you can’t cloth dipe and toxic wipe. I order a special cloth wipe warmer because you can’t just go using the disposable wipe warmer! I order flushable liners so I don’t have to touch poo! I order special detergent to wash my cloth diapers in because you cannot use regular detergent!

Noah gets it first. It’s orange, his best color, and adorable, and I take more pictures of his cute behind. In 90 minutes his diaper has leaked all over my pants while I read to him. Back on the interwebs. Some people birth heavy wetters, it seems, and I happen to be one of them. I ponder the likelihood that this trait is genetic while I search in vain for a pair of cleanish non-holey replacement yoga pants.

Change every hour! the helpful CD forums say. This makes cloth diapering more inconvenient than my still out of shape pubococcygeus (I hate Kegels) muscles but okay. Nothing more I’d like to do all day than spend my leisure time changing (and washing) two cloth diapers every hour.

Wash them better! Okay, buy some special stripping detergent to strip the special cloth diaper detergent I already bought. Nope. No go.

Load that baby up with extra inserts! I layer two, then three inserts together and now, once they get slightly soiled, they turn rock hard and bulky and Noah can hardly utilize his legs and is walking like a robot. A freakin‘ cute fluffy butt robot, but a robot nonetheless. The layers stop the leaking but. Not winning.

I finally make this happen by using gDiaper inserts in the BumGenius diapers. So we go on our way for a little happy while. I’m washing all 15 diapers each and every day and letting them air dry every night all over my dining room chairs.

How do you handle the poo? I heard often when I told (bragged) to people I was cloth diapering. Gotta get your hands in the poo, no way around it. Little baby poo, like Lola’s was at the time, tends to be water soluble so it will just wash out in the laundry. But Noah’s poo was toddler poo. This had to be dumped into the toilet first and flushed and then the diaper could be washed. But who has ever had a kid that does awesome perfect poo patties every time that just flip right out into the toilet? Not me!

Near the beginning of this escapade Noah takes a truly nasty poo. This is not a flipper. Now some CD moms have this handy sprayer that attaches to the toilet that you use to spray the diapers off. This is the one thing I did not invest in, because hello, I bought the flushable liners that are supposed to take care of this for me.

My choices are: A) dip the whole thing in the toilet with my hands and let it soak out, or B) wash it in the washer twenty times and hope that the poo comes out and doesn’t poo-ify every load of laundry I ever do from here to eternity.

Neither are acceptable scenarios, so I chose C. I know I need a sprayer for this job, and where do I have one? Aha! The kitchen sink! So I bring this double-pounder to the sink and start spraying. And bits of poo start flying.

You know that moment where you realize you’ve just made a terrible decision, but there’s no taking it back? Like hypothetically, when you sent that pic to your new boyfriend’s phone, but you don’t know him well enough to know that he for sure won’t show his best friend? Or in fact, you do know him somewhat, and what you do know points to the very likelihood that he will show his best friend? Hypothetically?

That’s how I felt. I immediately realize this is a horrible idea, but I’m in deep doo doo now and there’s no taking it back. I need to just bear down and get it done.

I eventually manage to get most of the poo off the diaper, but now the drain is stopping up and the sink is starting to fill with poo water. What do I do?? I’m gonna have to use the garbage disposal. I reach over with my elbow because my hands are biohazardly contaminated and flip the switch and shoot poo water up into the air and all over the counter. I have in effect now just used my sink to blend up a splattering poo milkshake. Omg I will barf right now!

The whole kitchen smells like a bloated rotting carcass and invisible poo particles are swirling through the air and landing on everything within five feet! I make a quick inventory of everything within five feet. All of Lola’s bottles, nipples etc. Vomit in my mouth. Bananas, apples, Mac and cheese still in the pot from earlier. I realize then that I myself am covered not only in invisible poo particles but actual poo particles and I would pay big money to stand in an acid bath right about now.

I finally get the poo dipe in the wash and throw away or bleach the shit out of everything in the vicinity including myself. The entire house has floating invisible poo particles in it that make it smell like a dirty gas station bathroom and even though it’s ten degrees outside I bundle the kids up and open all the windows. I wipe myself down, take a (mouth) breather, and recoup. That was seriously nearly the most disgusting poo experience I’ve had, though since I can think of two other poo experiences of mine that are horrific as well, and don’t involve children, I strangely start to feel better about this whole thing.

And yet. I still continue to cloth diaper! If I can handle that I can handle anything! At this point Mat and my babysitter are sort of not really into this yet, especially after my poo milkshake mishap, and so I have two diaper pails going, two wipe warmers, and two different piles of diapers to choose from. I ask my mom if I should bring the cloth diapers on vacation to Phoenix and she says – I’m paraphrasing here – Fuck No.*

So I’m still buying disposables and I’m still researching for hours searching for the perfect cloth diaper to convince everyone I have not lost the rest of my mind by trying this. After checking out several other brands, I do end up finding the holy grail of cloth diapers. Ragababe.

These are highly rated on all the diaper blogs and raved about on the forums and I must have one! Or 15-20 to be exact. I go to the website and end up on the ordering page where to my chagrin there are five or six paragraphs explaining exactly how, in 10 Easy Steps, I too can get my hands on one of these buggers.

It seems that Ragababes are the shit, and everyone wants them, and the tiny little mom-run company cannot keep them in stock. You have to sign up for their Facebook page where they will notify you of the date of the next stocking. The website then explains how you must go to the website a few minutes early with your trigger finger ready, constantly refreshing the browser until the slated time, because if you, say, have to deal with a screaming baby whose brother just now wanted to use his bulldozer to bulldoze her butt out of the way to make room for his burgeoning rail line you will miss the start of it and within seconds they are all sold out.

Shut the front door.

Who has time for this? Well apparently a lot of people. Including me. And I score! One diaper! And let me tell you, this diaper really is miraculous. It came in a cute hipster print and can be DRIED in the DRYER and actually holds up to my heavy wetter’s best shot and I fall in love.

Now I have to get many, many more. And I can’t. I follow the 10 Easy Steps to no avail. They hardly ever stock Noah’s size so he’s out. I finally do manage to get a couple in Lola’s size and they make me fall even harder. I’m becoming obsessed! How do I get more of these? Now my BumGenius are total has-beens and I can’t even stand to look at them. I’m looking lustily at the photos of the out of stock diapers on the website. Pink leopard! Newspaper print! Camouflage! My babies’ butts would be the envy of the town.

I search and search and find there is a black market of resale Ragababes on eBay and a couple of other sketchy sites and these things are going for like 25 more bucks than the original $35, which is nearly twice as much as the $19 BumGenius diapers. Should I? I shouldn’t. That’s stupid to pay 60 bucks for a diaper. Right?

I nearly fall under the eBay auction spell but I manage to control myself. I don’t buy. Because at this point I’ve also realized the dirty little secret of cloth diapering. It really doesn‘t save you that much money. It takes a bunch of tries to find the right cloth diaper, and besides that freak Ragababe these things don’t resell well or at all, so the money spent on dipes that don’t work is a loss. And if you do find something that you like, you want them in every freakin‘ color and design they come in because just like tattoos and Gucci bags, what you’ve got doesn’t satisfy you for very long.

In the end I never did get enough Ragababe love to be able to fully extract myself from clingy, psychotic BumGenius. And I started to loathe the BG. Because I could deal with just about anything with the diapers, but in the end my kids just started…smelling. And I couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Apparently, once the diapers have been used a few times they start retaining this excrement smell. And as soon as your kid pees even a little, the diaper lays on a full-frontal assault of the senses and reeks, and also makes your kid reek even once the diaper is off.

You are supposed to be able to strip these with the fancy stripping detergent to solve this problem, but it never worked. I did more research, tried a few other things, washed the shit out of them, and eventually gave up. Because even with cute little fluff butts, my children will not be the envy of the town if they permanently smell like a bloated rotting carcass. That smell was truly the last straw.

From here, after eating crow with my husband and returning the diamond in my mind, I put my stash of cloth dipes in storage and decided to try some eco-friendly disposable diapers. Research, internet, blah blah blah, I find some that are made in Turkey with paper lining and wood pulp absorbing pellets on the interior. Perfect!

Except. Since these don’t have super-absorbing powers of the “toxic” crunchy mom Unapproved Huggies you are technically supposed to change them more often. Didn’t totally figure this out until we went to our good friends‘ one year old’s birthday party. They have an awesome farm with awesome huge bouncy slides for the party. Noah is bouncing and sliding and having an awesome time. But, the thing with paper, as opposed to say plastic, is that when it gets wet, it doesn’t stretch.

Noah’s three hour old diaper – I mean you try to pry a two year old away from a huge awesome bouncy slide to change his eco-dipe – rips in half and all the millions of pee-soaked wood pulp pellets spread from the top of the slide where Noah is launching to the bottom where he ends his descent. Next is a frantic evacuation of the contaminated, formerly awesome bouncy slide.

Fortunately, our friends conveniently had a leaf blower in the shed, and Pete frankly seemed almost giddy to be able to break it out to blast all of Noah’s wood pellets from the scene of the crime. Also conveniently, as aforementioned, these are made of wood will biodegrade and not harm the environment. So, you know. Points for that.

And I thought I was ostracizing my kid when he smelled like a carcass. So, we are back to Huggies. These babies can last for 12 hours straight and will withstand all the excremental abuse my kids can throw at them. I get them super cheap at Costco. I sold my Ragababes for more than I paid for them, on eBay, and am saving up for a nice new diamond.

I think of all the hours I wasted researching, then washing diapers. I could have solved world hunger with all that brainpower! Well. At least I could have spliced together some cute kitten videos. I have reconciled myself to the fact that I am leaving the Earth full of trash generated by my spawn, and am trying to find ways to make up for it. Like buying recycled toilet paper. Mat’s not pleased about that, but I think he’s happy we aren’t washing poo cloths.

I realize that to keep from losing my mind I had to drop my expectations of what I can and can’t do. (Sense a theme?) I may not be able to save the world, but I have saved my sanity, which makes my world, and the people that inhabit it, a better place.

* My mom had the experience of cloth diapering in the 70’s without much choice. Like, the kind of cloth diapers with safety pins and plastic covers. Seriously? Sharp pins that will stab your child in his or her genitals? She can’t for the life of her understand why I would choose to cloth diaper. I print out lots of informative articles on the subject to bring with me to Phoenix.

I am not a natural in the kitchen. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself, because I’m not sure if anyone is born from the womb naturally inclined to wield knives (though NDB tried to at about 10 months) or perfectly time a soufflé. But I do know people who navigate the space with ease, churning out delicious, expertly filleted and flavored dishes and having the time to relish the efforts. This is my goal.

It was not more than two years ago at a big Thanksgiving celebration at my sister’s that I was in charge of peeling the apples for pies. I blame my left-handedness, but eventually someone had to take over for me because it took nearly 10 minutes of hacking for me to be able to finally present one mostly naked, already-oxidizing apple. I’m sure my dad got that on video. I’m sure it is painful to watch.

I know how to brown ground beef, but I still can’t hard boil an egg without the yolk turning that awful green.

I have never figured out how to easily prepare a mango, and instead succumb to paying three times the price for pre-cubed bites. I have heard there is a way to chop onions without crying all of my mascara off, but I haven’t stumbled upon it yet. I still don’t fully understand what “cutting against the grain” of meat means. I sometimes even use that nearly fail-proof appliance to microwave chicken nuggets for Noah into inedible rocks.

But I am determined. I have many cookbooks, and I drool longingly at the gorgeous photos and dream that someday I may be able to present a table full of interesting guests with a meal that looks like that. I read food blogs by ‘average‘ moms and I have convinced myself that if I just tried hard enough I could make my family look lovingly at the meal I’ve prepared just like their’s do.

A few times a week I try. Mat applauds my efforts every time. He’s not much of a cook either and I know that he truly does appreciate my attempts to put fresh food on our table. (I am slightly disheartened by the fact that our best meal so far has been one he found in a grilling cookbook that he prepares and serves. More on this dish later. It’s awesome. And it makes me feel bad about myself.)

Since I’ve had children I’ve become obsessed with mastering this piece of my housewiferly duties. But just like many other obsessions in my life, this one is more fun in the researching and dreaming than in the execution into reality. There is not much worse than spending an hour in the kitchen to have your seven year old give you her very honest and unfiltered opinion of the dish. (“This is gross!” I’ve heard more than once.) Not a lot that is more disheartening than having her favorite ‘homemade‘ meal of yours be the Hamburger Helper that you defaulted to on a crazy night. It’s not fun to get deep into a “30-minute” recipe and realize that the chef who wrote this piece of wishful thinking drank too much table wine because chopping the vegetables alone took the entire half hour.

I have realized today – not sure why it took me this long considering Lola is nine months old, but nonetheless – that I am not in a position to cook elaborate meals right now. Or even many of these 30 Minute monsters. When I am in the kitchen, I am not holding a child, and it is this realization that comes to both Noah and Lola right at the time I need to be “continually stirring.” Katya gets into the mix by suddenly discovering she desperately needs me to be the teacher’s helper in American Girl Doll School while I’m elbow deep in defrosted chicken parts and then when denied, complaining loudly that I never play with her. Dinner time is cranky time. For them and for me. And yet night after night I get myself into this mess.

The evening is even more stressful because I have to make three separate meals usually. One for Lola, one for Mat, Katya and me, and a modified version for Noah. Often, because of my above mentioned misfortune in picking recipes that take more than two Baby Einstein videos to make, Noah is in full Destructo mode (this is our superhero name for him when he gets so tired that he starts destroying all in his path, and toys and kittens are flying) and ends up with a scrambled egg and a squeezie (squeezie = most efficient way ever to get green things from the outside world into your baby.)

Mat thinks I should drink more wine while I cook, it’ll relax me, and I understand this to be one of the more pleasurable aspects of the endeavor. He has no problem drinking a lot of wine while I cook. However, I also have the misfortune that for some reason after my two-right-in-a-row-have-I-never-heard-of-birth-control pregnancies I have an extremely low ability to handle wine. (Maybe it’s my body’s way of protecting me from having more kids…because wine drinking got me into both pregnancies in the first place?) I blame the lame American doctors who forbid alcoholic beverages in pregnancy which crippled my tolerance. French women don’t have this problem. I have tried to remedy it by drinking vodka tonics, Champagne, and some crazy concoction my neighbor cooked up eponymously named the Scavetta*, to no avail. I can’t stomach much alcohol in the evening or the kitchen might light on fire while I doze.

So, I stress and stress and yell expletives at the cookbook author and throw knives (um, I mean, not really) and scream at Mat to take the kids far far away from me so I can cook a friggin’ lovingly homemade meal and we can sit at the table together and ENJOY OURSELVES.

Work in progress. But I will not give up. Because I grew up in one of those idyllic households where everyone sat down at the dinner table every night. We might have bitched about it, and threw food at each other. I’m sure we complained as loud as my kids do about the meals. But we did it.

My dad famously made us eat rotten, purple corndogs one night, one of the few my mom had to work late and couldn’t chaperone. On those nights we otherwise had a rotation of Dad’s Famous Meatloaf (not bad) and Dad’s Italian Sausage and Spaghetti (disgustingly served with a ladle of malodorous grease from the sausage.) My brother, or I, or my sister have at one time or another vomited on our dinner plates. My mom also had her famous ________ Surprise, which could be Fish, Lentil, or Beef Shoulder, or something else altogether. Sometimes her Surprises worked, sometimes they didn’t. But she tried. They both did, even though they worked all day. And we almost always ate together. And I remember it. And I want that for my family.

Many people learn to cook from their parents, but I’m sure you have to have some inkling to do it for it to happen. I know when I was younger I had no interest in learning – believing as my kids do it seems that there will always be someone just to make it for you. And I am sure my mom tried, though as hard as she worked during the day I can’t imagine her then coming home and exhaustively trying to motivate me in the kitchen.

So here I am, trying to learn it now. I don’t know what direction I’ll head, or where this will take me. My only hope is that my kids will learn an appreciation for good, real food. What I need to work on is demonstrating for them that cooking is not a chore, that it can and should be pleasurable and nourishing.

On that note, I need to calm down and lower my expectations. Seared Scallops with Corn and Bacon relish? Great idea until I dropped not one, not two, but three of those slippery bastards on the floor while Noah head-butted my leg trying to get my attention. I took a deep breath. Then hot oil spattered on to my face. It was at this point the tongs went flying across the room in disgust, bounced off the sink and hit me hard in the arm.

Let me restate this for you in case you missed the gravity of the situation.

In my attempt to make an awesome dinner, I almost impaled my son with a burning hot, greasy utensil.

Lesson learned, after I cried to my husband and boycotted dinner making forever? I need to understand that now is the time for simple goodness, and if it comes from a box sometimes that’s ok. In a few years, while the kids can entertain themselves and let Mommy have kitchen time alone, that’s when Bacon Scallops make their appearance again.

I am now in the process of collecting easy as dirt recipes for dinner. Send me your ideas!! And here is one for you – and may your kitchen adventures be less….adventurous than mine (i.e. learn from me and don’t kill anyone…)

Super Easy Fish Tacos

A few filets of white fish – we get ours frozen from Costco in a box and they are so fresh, sustainable, and inexpensive. I heart Costco even more than Target.

Cut fish into bite size strips and put in a Ziploc bag with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and some seasoning. I use Dirt from Whole Foods, it’s a Cajun type seasoning that is friggin’ good. Old Bay works just as well and has less bite. Marinate for 20 minutes.

Cook on medium in a non non-stick for a crispier bite with more cleanup time or in a non-stick to be super quick. Cook 2 minutes on each side.

Yay almost done!

Mix some prepared ranch (I get a ‘natural ranch’ seasoning packet from Whole Foods) with canned chipotle chiles in a blender or food processor or baby-food maker and use as sauce. Or mix some mayo with a bit of milk and more Dirt or Old Bay.)

Chop a bit of red cabbage or whatever lettuce type thing you have. It’s all good.

Serve with tortillas. (Before Lola I used to make my own tortillas from scratch. Yeah. So that doesn’t happen anymore. Whole Foods has some in the frozen section, as does Wegman’s for east coasters and Fry’s for west coasters, that are much better than the plasticky commercial ones. Or if you are feeling spritely, pick some up from a local Mexican bakery or restaurant.)

Done! Big hit with everyone! 15 minutes in the kitchen! Woohoo!

Would love to hear how you all handle dinners in your crazy homes!

* I have just figured out, after 36 years, what the word “eponymously” means, and will attempt to insert it into every blog post from now on.

We had a Memorial Day BBQ over at our house with friends whose kids are about Katya’s age. This is how it went.

Val:

It’s 5! Shit. Everyone’s gonna be here and nothing’s done! What, they’re gonna be late? Thank God! How rude. Get the dishes done. Spray that green crap and see if it will come off. Get the dog food off the floor or Lola will eat it. No time to wipe the table from lunch we’ll just spread all the paper plates out. The effing pasta is still boiling and I can’t put it into the effing pasta salad yet! Door! Coco shut the eff up! Turn Mickey Mouse Club off! Hi!

Where’s Lola? Ok. Hand stuck in the kitty door so she’s immobile for a few. Where’s Noah? Dammit!! The ENTIRE roll of toilet paper?! Where are the cats? Sweetheart you can’t pick the kitty up by his tail, ok? Where’s Coco? Why is she outside on the neighbor’s porch? Katya, please stop singing Taylor Swift at the top of your lungs, PLEASE. Where’s Lola?

I forgot to put the chopped onions out! Where’s Lola? I forgot to put the avocados in the guacamole! I forgot drinks for the kids! Yes we have silverware it’s white and plastic and I will stab you with it if I find it! Dammit I forgot to put the pasta salad out! Where’s Lola? No honey! Don’t eat that ball of cat hair! Where’s Noah? Noah please put the steak knife down! Where’s my vodka? You know, the drink I made at lunch at the Taylor’s earlier and still haven’t finished?

What are my friends talking about? Where’s Lola? Wheres the butter? Noah don’t wipe your ketchup face on the white sof…UGH!!!! Maybe he’ll wipe his vanilla ice cream face on the same spot and cancel it out? So what were we talking about? The Voice? Whose voice? Ask me about Chuggington! I know all about Chuggington!

Where’s Mat? Godammit!! Help me out with just ONE of our three kids! Now I’m the cursing-out-her-husband-in-front-of-people wife that I was just agreeing 10 minutes ago how embarrassing it would be to be. Awkward! Except I don’t care!! My friends probably have assumed that I birthed my personality out with my placenta, seeing as how I haven’t actually spoken to them all night. Where the hell is Lola???